Overview: Social Web

“fake news”... is grossly inadequate to explain the nature and scale of the problem... is being used by politicians... against the fourth estate and an excuse to censor free speech... There are four distinct motivations ... political, financial, psychological (for personal satisfaction) and social (to reinforce our belonging to communities or “tr…

There are 17 people on the task force, including diplomats, journalists and computer experts, and it has a mandate to combat misinformation coming out of Russia. One of its tools is a website called EUvsDisinfo.eu, which hosts a database with a selection of the most common lies disseminated by Russian outlets

News Quality Scoring Project ... humans and algorithm to separate “commodity news” from “value-added news” ... based on quantifiable and qualitative signals — like word count, freshness versus evergreen material, quote density, contextualization, and the presence of a byline... human/machine, subjective/objective hybrid as the still-under-constru…

I have an obvious incentive to get claps: pretty decent money. ... I can write more polarized headlines... on polarizing topics. I can piggy back on the hot news of the day... write things I don’t actually believe using incendiary language ... Medium has safeguards ... a team of curators ... a policy against abuse that it actually enforces... a t…

Saying goodbye to my oldblog on my old platform’s 10th birthday.

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

I was particularly ashamed of the way that the AAA ratings, which were in some sense a mathematical promise of safety, had been actually just lies, mathematical lies... like a weaponized mathematics ... actually people don’t want to know what their actual risk ... mathematics ... was being used ... so that people could go on doing essentially corr…

In the realm of knowledge, monopoly and conformism are inseparable perils. The danger is that these firms will inadvertently use their dominance to squash diversity of opinion and taste. Concentration is followed by homogenization... news media ... have rushed to produce articles that will flourish on those platforms... a duplication of the news…

a major new Yale University study finds that fact-checking and then tagging inaccurate news stories on social media doesn’t work... “disputed” tags made participants just 3.7 percentage points more likely to correctly judge headlines as false... Trump supporters and adults under 26... could actually end up increasing the likelihood that users wil…

A few people have asked me recently whether my Medium membership is worth it... We’re trying to fight the dark forces of advertising that are destroying our minds and democracy.

the future that Medium founder and CEO Ev Williams sees ... doesn’t include advertising, not even the native advertising that was a key piece of Medium’s plan ... a Spotify-ish model that pools subscribers’ $5 monthly contributions and doles them out to a select group of creators based on how many “claps” the creators get... once they’re in the …

A Mathematical Journey Into How Medium Payment [Probably] Works for Premium Authors

ProPublica published an in-depth investigation into the algorithms that Facebook uses to determine what it considers “hate speech” ...Facebook’s rules were being inconsistently applied... to learn more ... its first Facebook Messenger bot... to collect stories about people’s experiences with hate speech on Facebook... to help quantify the organiz…

how do we put the genie back in its bottle? Here are three approaches... If the first model leaves it to the legislator and ultimately the courts to decide what constitutes fake news, the second outsources responsibility to social media.... Instead of killing the story, you surround that story with related articles so as to provide more context a…

outrage explodsd... because it allowed us to make the story about ourselves... we could effortlessly and instantaneously join a global conversation... attracted more agreement from our following than resentment, and invigorated our social capital. We were putting our best face forward, aligning ourselves with an ethical and moral high ground, virt…

Financial incentive is key to Silverman’s understanding of fake news, which he defines as online misinformation that is completely false, created to deceive and economically motivated. If online misinformation is being created for ideological reasons it’s propaganda... delegitimising legitimate journalism... through delegitimising organisations t…

Clinicians should aim to understand parents’ values and engage in genuine, respectful conversations; these processes can help vaccine-hesitant parents feel heard and understood... Recognizing cognitive biases ... can also help ... omission bias may lead parents to blame themselves more if a child develops a vaccine-related side effect ... than ...…

Rupert Murdoch invested $70 million into VICE in August 2013... a portfolio company of the media genius that created the entire right wing tabloid machine’s is convincing a whole other demographic that the world is coming to an end. Anger and fear sell... exaggerated characters that create an extreme view of reality. It’s an appeal to your most b…

we investigate the cognitive psychological profile of individuals who fall prey to fake news. We find a consistent positive correlation between the propensity to think analytically – as measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) – and the ability to differentiate fake news from real news ... suggests that factors that undermine the legitimac…

exposing agents to the possibility of fake news can be an effective way to curtail the spread of fake news in social networks. Our results also highlight that information about the users' private beliefs and their social network structure can be extremely valuable to adversaries and should be well protected.

‘Vote Leave Take Control’ and ‘Make America Great Again’... future-focused, inspirational and told a sufficiently broad story for enough people to see a reflected image of themselves and their country that they could feel good about... get out of rebuttal mode, ditch the anaemic, snore-inducing, negative messages ... and go all in with a muscular…

public policy is being pushed into a realm where it’s not accessible... After PSA was adopted in Lucas County, Ohio... crimes committed by people awaiting trial fell, even as more defendants were released without having to post bail... Most governments ... didn’t appear to have the expertise to properly consider or answer questions about the pred…

How ideologues, opportunists, growth hackers, and internet marketers built a massive new universe of partisan news on the web and on Facebook... publishers are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue, with small operations easily earning five figures thanks to one website and at least one associated Facebook page... since T…

The “inclusiveness” of Kekistan and groups like Patriot Prayer... lures people who might not have been traditionally part of the GOP ... into the welcoming bosom of far-right causes. ... mainstreaming the more extreme versions of white nationalism and overt racism by making them appear more friendly and just about “free speech”... the “free speech…

Airbnb has been expanding its trust platform ... allowing them to translate their passions into professions... go to Airbnb’s site and click ... “experiences.” ... endless smorgasbord of people turning their passion into profit and their inner artisan into second careers.... grown tenfold this year... I’d like to say that Airbnb created 100 millio…

with a group, I as a community editor will have much more control and freedom over managing the discussion.... Here are some of the more interesting ways that publishers are using this feature:

Every time you open your phone or your computer, your brain is walking onto a battleground... Your captive attention is worth billions ... This has actually changed how you see the world... walls of code have turned you into a predictable asset — a user that can be mined for attention... by focusing on one over-simplified metric, one that suppor…

We need to strike a healthy balance between striving to reach more readers across platforms over which we have zero control, with bringing them back to... our apps and website... here’s how we’ve changed our approach over the past year:... an over-reliance on social media can leave us particularly vulnerable to sudden changes by platforms. Ultim…

What will misinformation look like in 2030? The full report... includes some ideas for how Wikipedia can fight “misinformation and censorship...:

A number of so-called scientific journals have accepted a Star Wars-themed spoof paper. The manuscript is an absurd mess of factual errors, plagiarism and movie quotes. I know because I wrote ... a spoof manuscript about “midi-chlorians” – the fictional entities which live inside cells and give Jedi their powers in Star Wars.